Devices in a wireless local area network (Wireless Local Area Network, WLAN) need to contend for a right of use of a channel resource, that is, to be a transmission opportunity (Transmission Opportunity, TXOP) holder. Currently, an access point (Access Point, AP) and a non-access point station (Non-Access Point Station, STA for short) have equal contention opportunities.
In the 802.11ax to which an OFDMA technology is introduced, the AP may perform uplink and downlink transmission scheduling for different STAs on different time-frequency resources, so as to improve system resource utilization.
However, when a relatively large quantity of user equipments access a network, contention is relatively strong, and therefore a probability of successfully contending for a channel by the AP is relatively low. If the AP cannot be a TXOP holder, multi-user scheduling transmission cannot be performed, and consequently resource utilization is difficult to improve.